Smith College Sophian: “Clothesline Project Hangs Abuse Out to Dry”

The April 10 Sophian reports on Smith College’s 14th annual Clothesline Project, honoring Sexual Abuse Awareness Week. The project began with 31 shirts displayed in Hyannis, Massachusetts in 1990. It has expanded to 500 projects worldwide.

More than one in six women in United States are victims of rape or sexual assault, according to a 2000 survey conducted by the National Violence Against Women Prevention Research Center (NVAWPRC). This ratio, however, reflects only the prevalence of reported violent crimes against women, which are estimated to be only one quarter of those that actually occur…

Most of the shirts are former garments worn by their creators, or belonged to the women they now memorialize. They have produced a powerfully stark presentation of uninhibited sentiment…

The project’s Web site [link] approximates that between 50,000 and 60,000 T-shirts have been created since its first display…

Among these problems, Troop noted, is an increase in the number of women killed by domestic violence. According to Troop, 55 women died as a result of domestic violence in 2007. In 2003, there were 14 such deaths…

…Poole [Ann Poole, a health services manager for health-care clinic Tapestry Inc.] also talked about sexually transmitted disease. She lamented that 25 percent of teenage girls in America have an STD…

La Wanza Lett-Brewington, executive director of Safe Passage, an anti-domestic violence organization in Northampton, described how women can be treated poorly in the western Massachusetts probate courts where many domestic and family cases are heard. She said there are some judges and lawyers in western Massachusetts who don’t believe domestic violence has occurred even when presented with police and hospital records…

Juliana Morgan-Trostle, an Amherst Regional High School student and member of the school’s Women’s Rights Club, noted the lack of sexual education girls are receiving at high school.

Bridges: “…condoms were present in 11 percent of the scenes… A
discussion of ‘Let’s be safe’ or ‘Put on a condom’ or something of that
happened in…one scene of the 304. Nice ‘education’…”

Bridges: “So how many scenes didn’t contain aggression? About 10%.”

Bridges: “For verbal aggression, by far namecalling and insulting were
the most common types. They were seen in almost half of scenes.”

Bridges: “Gagging and choking were much, much more common than any of us thought when we first walked into this project.”

Bridges: “Slapping happened 30% of the time… Most of the aggressors
in these films were men…73%. By far the most common recipient of
aggression was a woman. Even when women were aggressing, they were
generally aggressing other women.”

Bridges: “How did the person respond when they were aggressed?… In
95% of these 3,000 and some acts of aggression, the person was either
neutral, as in no change of facial expression or verbal expression, or
was sort of saying, ‘That feels great. Keep doing it. Right on.’ And in
only 3% did we see some overt expression of displeasure or pain. Again,
it seems to be very important to the people who are watching this to
believe that the recipient of aggression is fact enjoying it, is
choosing it at some level.”

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Effects of Prolonged Consumption of Pornography on Family Values; Women’s
Desire to Have Daughters PlummetsThe most astonishing effect of prolonged pornography consumption on
family values, however, concerns the desire to have children…
[E]xposure to pornography reduced the desire to have children, and it
did so in a uniform fashion. Male and female respondents, students and
nonstudents alike, wanted fewer children on the average. The desire to
have male offspring dropped 31%. The desire for female offspring, being
lower overall, dropped by about twice that margin: 61%. This reduction
proved specific to gender. Male respondents expressed little desire for
female offspring altogether. It’s the desire of females for offspring
of their own kind that, after consumption of pornography, shrank to one
third of its normal strength…

His defense lawyer, David Hoose, argued the girl’s
precocious knowledge of sexuality created a reasonable doubt as to
whether her accusations against Jaundoo were accurate.

“The
child was exposed to a lot of information about sex at an
inappropriately early age,” Hoose said in a telephone interview
Tuesday. How or by whom she was exposed to this information is unclear,
he said.

Jaundoo was originally convicted of the charges in
2003 and sentenced to 18-20 years, but the Appeals Court overturned
that verdict in 2005 on the grounds that the jury should not have been
allowed to hear about the large collection of pornography found in
Jaundoo’s home.

The appellate ruling is hard to square with evidence such as this testimony
before the Minneapolis Government Operations Committee during the 1983
civil rights hearings on pornography. Bill Neiman of the Hennepin
County Attorney’s Office found that not only was it common to discover
pornography in the homes of sexual abusers, it was more
common when the victim was a child. Jaundoo’s possession of porn was
absolutely relevant to the case. According to the Springfield Republican:

When the victim testified four years ago, she said Jaundoo
would sometimes give her a dollar after making her engage in sex acts
with him, and showed her a pornographic video and magazines. She also
testified Jaundoo said her mother would beat her if she told anyone
about the sexual abuse.

The implications of yesterday’s
verdict could further stigmatize and silence victims of child sexual
abuse and deter them from seeking justice in court. In the days before
feminism, a woman who was “tainted” by past sexual activity was deemed
not credible in a rape trial. Whether or not Jaundoo raped this girl,
someone clearly abused her (or was grossly negligent) by exposing her
to inappropriate sexual materials. Now the court system is telling her
that her victimization makes her “tainted”, that her assertions of
abuse have no value.

In her study of porn and child sexual abuse, Professor Diana Russell relates how mere exposure to porn can make children reluctant to seek protection from abuse:

When
child molesters expose targeted children to pornography, the children
often feel guilty and complicit, particularly if they found the
material sexually exciting or masturbated to it. According to Scotland
Yard, one of the five major ways that pedophiles use
pornography is to “ensure the secrecy of any sexual activity with a
child who has already been seduced” (Tate, 1990, p. 24). Child
molesters can often silence their victims by telling them that their
parents would be very upset to learn that they had watched pornography.
Even without such warnings, children often fear that their parents will
blame and punish them for having looked at this material. Children who
are sexually abused following the exposure may feel complicit in the
abuse and thus become even more motivated to remain silent. Ultimately,
this reduces the likelihood that abused children will disclose the
sexual abuse to their parents or others.

In
the Jaundoo case, the court astonishingly appears to have reinforced
the value to sexual predators of silencing children or neutralizing
their testimony by exposing them to porn…

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